Ashley leads a bit of a double life, moonlighting as a rapper who has released an album and attended the Grammy’s. When he wasn’t spitting rhymes, he was sitting in engineering classes that he hoped would fund his future label. However, he couldn’t bring himself to leave APL, its opportunities, or the field in general.

Ashley splits his days between field experiments, testing and development, and visiting college campuses as a guest speaker. When he isn’t at government offices discussing projects with a sponsor, he’s out in the desert or at sea conducting applied testing. His main goal is to see his experiments deployed in the world—and sometimes beyond it.